The First Voyage Read online

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  TIME

  PART 1 – BIRD ISLAND

  1. Buffalo Horn

  2. Frog Hill

  3. Crocodiles

  4. Shufflewing

  5. The Stand

  6. The Explosion

  7. Hunted

  8. Bird Lake

  9. One Piece Of Bamboo

  10. The Rush

  11. Building

  12. Fast Fish

  13. The Last Day

  PART 2 – THE VOYAGE

  1. Calm

  2. Alone

  3. The Coconut

  4. Shadow

  5. The Bird

  6. Storm

  7. After

  8. The Sliver

  9. Wreck

  PART 3 -THE NEW LAND

  1. The Beach

  2. Monsters

  3. The Ridge

  POSTSCRIPT

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Allan Baillie began writing stories for fun while still at school. He is now one of Australia’s most acclaimed writers for children, and his novels have gained him awards and international recognition. His recent novel, Krakatoa Lighthouse, was winner of the 2010 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award Patricia Wrightson Prize.

  Allan spends most of his time with his wife Agnes in Avalon, north of Sydney, but they travel regularly and widely, though never as far as he does in his imagination.

  Find more about Allan Baillie at allanbaillie.com.au.

  ALSO BY ALLAN BAILLIE

  Adrift

  Little Brother PICTURE BOOKS

  Riverman Drac and the Gremlin

  Eagle Island The Boss

  Megan’s Star Rebel!

  Mates Old Magic

  Hero DragonQuest

  The China Coin Star Navigator

  Little Monster Archie the Good Bad Wolf

  The Bad Guys Castles

  Magician

  The Dream Catcher NON-FICTION

  Songman Legends

  Secrets of Walden Rising Heroes

  The Last Shot Riding with Thunderbolt

  Wreck! Villains

  Saving Abbie

  Treasure Hunters

  The Excuse

  Foggy

  Imp

  A Taste of Cockroach

  Cat’s Mountain

  Krakatoa Lighthouse

  Outpost

  We have to go back.

  On 20 July 1969, Neil Armstrong, the commander of Apollo 11, walked on the Moon.

  On 3 August 1958, the nuclear submarine USS Nautilus reached the North Pole under the Arctic ice cap.

  On 31 May 1928, Charles Kingsford-Smith took off from Oakland, California, USA, in his Fokker Trimotor plane called the Southern Cross, and flew across the Pacific Ocean to Brisbane, Australia.

  From 1768 to 1770, Lieutenant James Cook sailed his bark ship HMS Endeavour from England to Tahiti, New Zealand and Australia.

  Between 1519 and 1522, Ferdinand Magellan’s ships sailed around the Earth.

  On 12 October 1492, Christopher Columbus reached America.

  Around AD 1000, the Viking Leif Ericson sailed his longboat to Newfoundland, North America.

  In AD 50, the Romans started to build London.

  Around 220 BC, the Chinese began work on the Great Wall of China.

  In 700 BC, the Celts walked from France to Britain.

  In 753 BC, Romulus founded the city of Rome.

  In 1200 BC, Troy was destroyed by fire.

  Around 1800 BC, the Polynesians reached Micronesia with their outrigger canoes.

  Between 2550 and 2560 BC, the Great Pyramid of Giza was constructed.

  Around 3000 BC, the building of Stonehenge began.

  In 6000 BC, Egyptians started to grow sorghum, millet and wheat along the upper Nile.

  In 10,000 BC, mammoths became extinct, and the hunter-gatherers in the Middle East began to keep goats and dogs, as well as grow their own food.

  In 14,500 BC, tribes in Alaska found an ice-free corridor into Canada, allowing them to move southwards.

  In 18,000 BC, people in central China were making pottery.

  In 20,000 BC, the Ice Age began and tribes moved from Siberia across the Bering ice bridge to Alaska.

  Around 24,000 BC, Neanderthals became extinct.

  Around 28,000 BC, Aboriginal tribes reached Timor by little steps from island to island.

  Now, on that small island . . .

  This is my moment.

  It is very early dawn. So early that the morning mist hasn’t lifted from the Snake River, and dawn is only just beginning to give the sky a tint of faint pink. The hunters for Yam tribe are standing around on the river’s flats with the mist swirling around their legs, and the gatherers are looking on from the mangroves. The gatherers – women and children – shouldn’t be watching this, but the Elder, Eagle Eye, has put us on the flats so that they can see too.

  So everyone from Yam tribe – the hunters, the gatherers – is staring at me. And I’m not special. They call me Bent Beak because my pa saw an old seagull with a crooked beak on my birth. I have a bony body, with a scar on my right arm from trying to catch a monkey. And that’s it.

  I don’t have much, only three things.

  There is the grass cord on my waist. I hook a caught fish or bird on the cord to carry it. In the cord there is a red strand from The Wind, from her fancy dillybag. My mate Shufflewing says she gave me the cord to mark her property, like the string of little shells around her neck. But I don’t care.

  And there is my fish spear. That spear is important. My pa taught me to find the long, hardwood, young sapling; to cut it and whittle down the end with pebbles; to make a notch near the point to snare the fish, and then harden the point in the fire. The spear is twice as long as me. But that spear is all I have to remember him.

  But the hunters are not here for the grass cord or the spear. They are here for the Buffalo Horn hanging from my neck. That is not from here, not from this Bird Island. There are no buffalos on the Bird Island anywhere. It comes from the Long Island, where Eagle Eye killed a huge buffalo and took one of its horns.

  Eagle Eye has white hair, even his beard is white, and Fast Fish says that it happened from the buffalo. Fast Fish’s beard is solid black. I can’t remember when his beard wasn’t there. Maybe he was born with it and he looked angry then too. He’s angry all the time.

  That Horn is the greatest thing the Yam tribe have. Not just because Eagle Eye got it, but because of what it does.

  When I put my fingers on it I can feel the work of Burnt Earth. Eagle Eye allowed that long skinny boy to carve fish, birds and patterns on the Horn. The boy is dumb as a monkey nibbling a banana on the back of a sleeping crocodile. He ran up a coconut tree once after a monkey, until the other monkeys threw coconuts at him. He did get us a few coconuts though. And he can do something with a stone chip.

  Soon, I will pass the Buffalo Horn to Shufflewing. He got his name from a funny bird that crashes every time it lands, and he is short, but he is not a funny bird today. Maybe he should have had the Horn before me, as he has a family.

  Shufflewing is jamming his light spear – that spear is for birds, light for flight and no notch – in the wet sand, wiping his hands on his legs and trying to smile at me. I can see that he is very scared, so I wink at him and shrug, like there’s nothing to worry about. But I remember how I felt when I was getting the Horn. That was like swimming along while being circled by a shark. Shufflewing will be thinking: What if Eagle Eye decides that I am not good enough and turns away? What if the grass cord snaps as I take it? What if the Buffalo Horn crashes down and gets broken?

  Eagle Eye moves towards me and Shufflewing. He lifts his hands for the Horn and says, ‘Bent Beak.’
>
  He doesn’t look at me, never mind that he became my father after my real pa was killed, but that is all right. This is an important moment where we do things a certain way. So I take the cord from around my neck and hold the Buffalo Horn out. Shufflewing stares at it with a look of panic.

  I quickly glance at the hunters, but that was not a good idea. All the hunters look bored. Burnt Earth is picking at his spear, Fast Fish is leaning on one of his spears with his left foot cocked on his right knee, and Old Tortoise is wiping his nose with his elbow – he looks tired, but he is like that all the time. He is older than Eagle Eye, older even than the moon, and he knows everything about the spirits. I wonder about dropping the Horn, just to wake them all.

  But Eagle Eye ignores the hunters. He takes the Horn from me, and that finishes my moment.

  Eagle Eye looks down to short Shufflewing. ‘All right?’ he asks.

  Shufflewing blinks at him as if he can’t hear.

  ‘Are you ready?’ Eagle Eye says.

  ‘Oh. Yes. Yes.’ Shufflewing bobs his head.

  ‘All right.’ Eagle Eye thrusts the Buffalo Horn towards him. Shufflewing puts his hands on the Horn, but he looks at me as if he needs permission from me. I quickly frown at him, telling him to get on with it.

  ‘Well?’ Eagle Eye says.

  Shufflewing lifts the Horn, looks at it and freezes. He has seen it many times, and touched it. But this is different.

  I think about what he must be thinking, feeling the lightness of the Horn – almost a feather – feeling its scars, seeing the strange shapes of Burnt Earth’s carvings. But this is no time to just look at it . . .

  ‘Come on, blow!’ Eagle Eye says impatiently.

  Shufflewing looks at him and looks back at the Horn. ‘Blow . . .’ he says.

  ‘Yes. I can’t give the Horn to you if you cannot blow it.’

  Shufflewing licks his lips, slowly lifts the Horn to his mouth and blows. It sounds like a strangled green pygmy goose.

  ‘Ah . . .’ Eagle Eye is disappointed.

  Shufflewing stares at the Horn for a moment – he is not good enough – and begins to pass it to Eagle Eye.

  ‘Hey,’ Old Tortoise calls out. ‘Give him another go.’

  Eagle Eye glances at the old man and frowns, but he pushes the Horn back to Shufflewing. ‘Try it again.’

  Shufflewing glares at the Horn. He lifts it, takes a deep breath, pushes it against his lips and blows. For a moment, the sound of the Horn is even more terrible than before, but then he remembers what I told him. About keeping the tongue on the edge of the Horn. Suddenly, it was thunder from a storm. The hills around us echo the sound.

  Shufflewing says, ‘Hey!’ Then he sucks up a breath and blasts the ringing hills.

  ‘All right, enough.’ Eagle Eye waves him down.

  ‘You see? That’s better,’ Old Tortoise calls.

  Eagle Eye sighs softly. Old Tortoise should not talk now, but like I say, he is an old man and he uses that to do what he wants. Eagle Eye turns to the distant gatherers in the shallows of the mangroves. ‘Can you hear that?’

  I can see The Wind tumbling into the mangroves’ muddy water with her dillybag, as if she has been hit by lightning. She would have to overdo her reaction to the sound . . . But then I see Brown Moss tilts her head and bangs her ear, as if she has been deafened. The Wind just does as she does.

  Brown Moss is Eagle Eye’s wife. He calls her ‘The Boss’. She calls him ‘My White Dillybag’.

  ‘You now have the Buffalo Horn, Shufflewing.’ Eagle Eye nods at him. ‘You look after it.’

  Shufflewing stays staring at Eagle Eye, as if there is something else coming, but that is all Eagle Eye has to say. The hunters trail back to the camp. Fast Fish is the last to leave. He pulls his three spears from the sand, adjusts his axe on his leg and walks away.

  Eagle Eye looks at me. ‘You better take him to Frog Hill.’

  Shufflewing is holding up the Horn for his mother and his little sister to see as I push him towards the track to the hill.

  Shufflewing and me have a special thing with Frog Hill, from the times we’ve spent there. But he is worrying about the Horn now – he is gripping it with both hands, as if it might fly away.

  For a while, I carry both his spear and mine, but he relaxes after a while and takes his spear back. I lead him along the track, away from the Snake River, to the shivering thin trees and scrub. He has been on that hill almost as many times as me, but he follows me respectfully, shuffling a few paces behind. I don’t like it at all.

  I turn to him. ‘How do you feel now? Big?’

  Shufflewing is still stroking the Horn, ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I thought Eagle Eye would say something about how important this is.’

  ‘That’s just him. He knows that you know that already, so he doesn’t talk about it,’ I say.

  ‘Um.’

  We walk on.

  And then he looks at me. ‘Because of my pa?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Like yours.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Then he nods. And that is that.

  I guess we don’t talk much. Sometimes we just know what the other one is thinking.

  My pa died with his pa. They built two little bamboo rafts and took them into the swamp of the Bird Lake to look for climbing perches. Then the Crocodiles got them. Not those fat crocodiles – they could deal with them – but these were Crocodile warriors from the Crocodile tribe. Nobody saw the Crocodiles, not before or after. Just heard the shouting and one scream.

  We found them lying in the reeds with spear wounds.

  Shufflewing suddenly says, ‘I never saw Crocodile warriors. I don’t know what they look like.’

  I saw them once when I was trying to spear dwarf deer in the Sleeping Turtle Mountain. I shake my head at Shufflewing. ‘You don’t want to see them. They look terrible. They knock out their two front teeth to make themselves terrible.’

  ‘So they can hiss like a great snake.’ He knows my story.

  He looks down and rubs the Buffalo Horn.

  I watch him. ‘But they are not more terrible than Eagle Eye. Never.’

  ‘He is old now.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter for the hunter who brought down a buffalo.’

  He slowly smiles. ‘Yes. He can frighten anyone when he feels like it. Oh, I wish that I was there that day . . . But you were there, weren’t you?’

  ‘Um, well,’ I look away in embarrassment. In the past, I’d told him a little bit of exaggeration. But now he is Shufflewing who carries the Horn, like me. That changes everything. ‘Well, not really,’ I say. ‘I was in the camp when the hunters came back with meat and the Horn. The meat was huge – the hunters staggered with the weight . . .’

  ‘Oh.’ His voice is flat. ‘You didn’t see the buffalo.’

  ‘But my pa did. It’s the same.’

  He shrugs and that affects me.

  ‘How big was that buffalo?’ he asks.

  I grab the Horn from his hands, shove my spear at him and hurry to a big boulder. I put the Horn on the edge of the boulder, make a fist with my other hand and put it on the other side of the broad edge. ‘It was bigger than this. And it was a male, a bull.’

  He looks at the boulder.

  I remember what Pa said. That bull glared at them with bloodshot eyes, its huge mouth dripping saliva, and it was swinging its horns to catch the sun. And then, it charged. Pa stumbled away and the other hunters fled – even Fast Fish – but not Eagle Eye. He stood still as the buffalo bore down, and then he put his spear through its heart.

  I give Shufflewing the Horn back. For a while, he keeps staring at the boulder, then he looks at me and he says, ‘You saw it.’

  We slowly climb the jungle slopes – where saplings fight for room between the crowded trees, huge leaves and brush – to the Frog Hill. Shufflewing is still stroking the Horn, but now he wants to talk as we climb.

  Finally, we reach
the top of the Frog Hill.

  The top is nothing much. It is covered in scrub, and we have to move to see through the dense hardwood trees, coconut trees and palm trees. But you can see things . . .

  We are looking down at Yam camp on the Snake River. There is a whisper of smoke coiling up from a single fire. An old woman is looking after it, sitting next to Fast Fish’s canoe on the dry mud.

  Near the camp is a beach and the mangrove trees – mighty mangrove trees. They are bigger even than the giant mountain trees. When the rain came, the Snake River nudged them away over time as it rushed to the sea, leaving a break in the mangroves.

  But not now. Now, the Snake River is sleeping, held back by a sand bar.

  Beyond the mangroves there is kelp seaweed – you can’t see it from Frog Hill, but it is there and it is full of fish. And then, the blue ocean, unbroken to the horizon.

  But that isn’t what I’m looking for. I’m looking at the long beach when I see that Shufflewing is grinning in a funny way. ‘What?’

  ‘You’re looking for that old Crab woman!’

  ‘Very funny.’

  ‘She would be looking for you.’

  I shrug. ‘Always.’

  The Crab tribe camp is along that white beach – at least, it was. They have started to wander a bit. They were here on Bird Island before us, but they don’t hate us because of that – unlike the Crocodiles. Every time we see Crabs, we all share a feast and we trade for two days.

  The Crab’s old woman had a necklace of tiny shells, and I remembered how The Wind liked having a fancy dillybag. She couldn’t just use an old grass dillybag on her shoulder – no, she had to have red and yellow grass weaving through normal grass. And so I thought that she would like those fancy shells too. But the old woman wanted my mountain deer pelt for them. That deer pelt was my treasure for many moons – I loved the smell when I put my head on it for a sleep. But the old woman, she wouldn’t move. And I knew The Wind would like those tiny shells, so . . .

  Shufflewing says that The Wind is a blue wren because she flutters about me, but Burnt Earth says she must have knocked her head to go with me. I ignore Burnt Earth most of the time, but he and Shufflewing and Fast Fish and the others have often been nudging me about that deal with the old Crab woman.